The sky is a deep shade of violet when Nyx looks up into it, stars twinkling beyond the smoke and dust rising from the city. It’s so much thinner than it was before, the air so much clearer, and it’s almost… quiet now. 

No, it is quiet. Except for…

A short distance away, Nyx can hear the faint, but distinct, sound of sobbing. Someone is still in trouble, she’s sure—which means her job here isn’t done yet. Even after everything that’s happened—losing Ozzy, a building falling on her, and… whatever she had just gone through in the dark—there’s still work to be done, and she can’t waste time wallowing in her own imbalance.

But when she steps out of the rubble of the building that had collapsed on her, and follows the sound of the sobbing…

…It’s her friends’ faces that greet her. 

“Guys…?”

“Nyx!” 

Baelia is the first to notice her. She stands up from where she had been huddled up and tries to run, stumbling over her shaking legs, reaching out for Nyx as she goes. Nyx reaches back, her eyes welling with tears to match the ones starting to pool in Baelia’s. 

“Hi, B.”

Baelia’s hands fall on Nyx’s shoulders, then pull her into a hug. Nyx returns it without thinking, tilting her head to tuck it into the crook of the Grey Faerie’s neck. Something in her throbs, then—not in pain, not exactly. But there’s a burning in her throat and an ache in her chest that makes her wonder when she’d last been hugged.

Baelia lets her go too soon, but Nyx doesn’t say anything. She looks past Baelia to her other friends, who have gathered around for their turn: first Luxinia, then Styx, and finally Juni, yipping like mad to scold her and welcome her back at the same time.

“I missed you, too,” she says, ruffling the tuft of fur atop her Faellie companion’s head. Juni jumps back down to the ground, mock-offended, and tries to flatten it back out again. Nyx laughs, and almost cries again—it feels like it’s been forever since she last laughed, too. But then she looks up, searching for the one person who hadn’t greeted her yet. 

“Tavi…”

A short ways ahead, Tavi turns her head. Her lips waver, and her eyes screw shut, as if she were fighting against herself. Nyx can’t blame her. After everything she had said before, when Tavi had only been trying to help…

No. When she had helped. When she had saved Nyx, Nyx had shown gratitude by yelling at her.

“We looked everywhere for you,” Luxinia says, somewhat awkwardly; Nyx wonders for a moment if she can sense how upset both she and Tavi are. “We thought you were…”

“Don’t worry, I’m not,” Nyx says. “I’m fine. I don’t… really know how, or why, but I think it has something to do with this Void stuff on my arm. I think it’s changed me a little more than I realised.” Before anyone can ask any further about it, she shakes her head to stop them, because she doesn’t really want to relive everything that had just happened. “How is everyone else, though?”

The others exchange a glance. “We… We’re all fine,” Luxinia says, biting at her lip. “After what happened to you… Well, we and many others helped to get as many people out of the city as possible.”

Nyx swallows. “H-how many…?” 

She looks at Juni, trusting him to give her a fair, accurate, and (mostly) unbiased report, even though Nyx isn’t sure she really wants the answer. But she has to know. 

When Juni’s ears droop, Nyx’s stomach sinks. It’s what she had expected, but…

“Not enough,” Baelia whispers, just to confirm it. 

Luxinia jumps in. “But—but you know, a whole building fell on you!” she says, aiming for chipper but falling just flat. Nyx doesn’t know how to feel about that. “You made it out of that okay, right? So there’s no telling, you know?”

“I guess.” Nyx sighs. “I’m sorry. I… This is my fault. If I hadn’t gotten so mad and gone off on my own, maybe we could have worked together to save more people.”

“Nyx…”

“No, Lux. Don’t tell me that isn’t true. I know it is. I thought I had been growing, and I was trying to be better, but I keep getting angry and… And look where it’s gotten us: Ozzy’s gone, I upset you all, and so many more people have been hurt, all because I was selfish.” 

“But Nyx—”

“Stop it. Both of you.” 

Nyx and Luxinia turn. It’s Tavi who had spoken, this time. She’s looking right at Nyx, her whole body shaking. “You did the best you could. We saved as many as we could. Now we need to go save someone else, don’t we?” She tries to force herself to smile, but Nyx doesn’t need Luxinia’s powers to know that it’s fake. “Lux was just telling us that she knows a way to get us to Faerieland. So go on, Lux, tell us.”

“Um… right,” Luxinia says, her eyes darting from Tavi to Nyx and back again, until they settle on Nyx. “You remember my friend, the giant Walein…?”

Luxinia had told them her plan: construct a giant horn to summon the Walein that brought them to Neopia Central at the beginning of their journey, using pieces scavenged from the rubble. Baelia had reassured them that she could make one… not quite easily, but she could do it. When Nyx looks over to see her progress so far, it seems to be going well: the mouthpiece is done, and she’s working on a cone to put at the end of the horn now. Next to her, Styx drops a twig on top of a pile of sticks he had gathered, and Baelia graciously makes a show of trying to make them into something useful.

Everyone else has scattered to dig through the wreckage for anything they can find. Luxinia is using her lantern to search from above, and Juni is scanning the rubble with his new sight-powers, which they’ve decided to call Nether Sight. That leaves Nyx alone to use her void tendrils to sort through the debris—they’re working again, albeit with slight flickers here and there. And Tavi…

Nyx puts down the brick she had just lifted, deeming it useless. She glances over her shoulder at where Tavi’s poking around the rubble, but it doesn’t look like the Kyrii has accomplished much.

Nyx takes a breath and resolves to go over there, even though a tight knot in her chest warns her that Tavi probably doesn’t want company now. (Or maybe just doesn’t want hers.)

She goes over anyway.

“Hey,” Nyx says, boots crunching gravel beneath them. Tavi stops what she’s doing and lowers her head further toward the ground.

“Hey,” she says back, without looking up.

Nyx swallows. “Tavi,” she starts, voice wavering, “I just wanted to say… I wanted to say that I’m so—”

Before she can finish, Nyx is knocked right off her feet, the breath punched from her lungs. She lands flat on her back with a small “oof!” and scrambles for a moment, but then realises she’s trapped where she is, because there’s a warm, soft, shaking red Kyrii on top of her. 

And that Kyrii is crying.

“Tavi—?!”

“Don’t you d-dare apologise!” Tavi sobs, lifting her head and pounding (a little painfully) on Nyx’s chest. “I’m the one who should apologise! I was upset and took a risk I shouldn’t have, just like I used to, and I—you almost—and the last thing I would have said to you was that you couldn’t have saved your brother—and then we were just going to leave, because we thought we’d lost you!”

She heaves one more great, trembling breath, squeezes her eyes and mouth shut, and then shuffles off of Nyx, wiping at the tears staining her fur. Nyx sits up too, letting Tavi cry for a second, because she doesn’t know what to say. And then…

“I yelled at you,” she says, softly, “because I didn’t know how to feel about the fact that you’d saved me. Nobody has ever done anything like that for me before, and I—I don’t really… know how to have friends.” Tavi opens her mouth to protest, but Nyx lifts a hand to stop her before she can get the words out. She doesn’t want to make Tavi lie and say she really is a good friend. She isn’t.

But she wants to be.

“I blamed you when I shouldn’t have,” Nyx continues. “It was easier than blaming myself for being too slow, or for not being there when Ozzy needed me… again. I couldn’t control my emotions, and I… I panicked. I said a lot of things that I shouldn’t have, and a lot of things I didn’t mean.” 

Tavi sniffles. “You were upset. I d-didn’t take it personally.” 

“But that’s just it. In the moment, it was personal.” Nyx reaches out for Tavi, but stops just shy of taking her hand. “I decided to be mad at you because I was mad at me, so I lashed out… and nearly lost one of the best friends I’ve ever had because of it.” 

There’s silence between them, just for a moment. Tavi sniffles again, then smiles—a real smile, not forced this time—and laughs, a hiccup more than anything else, before closing the distance between their hands to entwine their fingers together. “You know… I’m loving all this self-realisation, and I appreciate the apology, but the truth is that you could have shot me with one of your void blasty thingies instead of just yelling at me, and I still wouldn’t care right now. I’m just so glad you’re alive!”

“I’m glad I am, too,” Nyx says. “And that you’re safe and sound. Thank you for saving me, Tavi. And I don’t just mean from that building.” 

Tavi turns her head, trying and failing to hide the flush staining her cheeks beneath her fur. “Aw, I know you’d have done the same for me… and you did! So I’d say we’re about even now.”

“I don’t know about that,” Nyx mutters, but she accepts the concession anyway. There’s one more thing on her mind, though…

“So… are we good, Tavi?”

Tavi nods. “We’re more than good,” she says, squeezing Nyx’s hand. “And we’re going to make things right. Not just between us, but between you and Ozzy, too. So come on.” She grins and stands up, pulling Nyx to her feet beside her. “Let’s find whatever B needs, call that giant Walein, and get our butts to Faerieland!”